Carter Niemeyer Interview

Carter Niemeyer helped capture the wolves that were brought to Yellowstone National Park and Idaho in the 1990’s. He had began his career as a government trapper in Montana in the mid 1980’s. In 2000 he became the Idaho wolf recovery coordinator for the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service. He served in that capacity until his retirement in 2006. This interview was conducted in the spring of 2009.

How many wolves have you actually handled?
I’ve probably handled nearly 300 wolves through helicopter capture and foothold trapping, so I’ve spent an extensive amount of my career in the field handling live wolves.

There are those who say we brought the wrong wolves into Idaho in 1995 and 1996, that they’re bigger wolves than the ones that were here.
I have to support the science again, and specialists in morphology and genetics on wolves indicate that the wolf that was brought down from Canada is the same wolf that lived here previously. And I did some research into books on early wolves that were captured in the Northern Rockies, even as far south as Colorado during the days that wolves were being hunted down in the 1930s; and the body weights were very much the same.

So I feel that this wolf that was brought from Canada is the same species and genetics as the wolves that lived here once upon a time. I think people have to remember that the northern Rockies — we call it the northern Rockies in Idaho and Montana, but actually we’re a southern extension of the northern Rockies out of Canada — and all of those wolves in Canada have the potential and the ability to disperse. I believe what happened over the last 50-60 years is that individual wolves have come from Canada following the Rocky Mountain chain and ended up periodically in places like Montana and Idaho.

What is it about the wolf that causes people so much grief?
Well, principally, the grief is about people more than wolves, because people have so many different values and wolves mean so many different things to different people. And, of course, you go back to the myths and the fairytales. Early European settlers dealt with wolves trying to kill their livestock, when livestock was kind of displacing the wild ungulates. And so it’s always been a curse to the livestock industry and a competitor with them.

And then as we move forward, I think people have grown away from the land and become more urbanized, and most people don’t even understand what a wild wolf is all about. And so there’s just a lot of fear and misconception on the one hand, and on the other hand, they resemble someone’s pet dog; and so you elevate them to a status where they’re noble, majestic and man’s best friend, and the real answer is that it’s somewhere in the middle of all this.

Carter Niemeyer Interview — Wolves In Idaho — Outdoor Idaho (Idaho Public Television).